Wealthy ‘turn their backs on offshore tax havens’: FT

UK wealth managers “are quietly scaling back access to offshore accounts for their clients”, as the global crackdown on tax havens, of which the OECD’s Common Reporting Standard is a major component, “gathers pace”, the Financial Times is reporting today, citing research it commissioned.

The American tax legislation known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which was signed into law in 2010 and which obliged non-US banks and other financial institutions to hand over details of their customers’ accounts to the US tax authorities, has also contributed to the trend not to make use of low-tax overseas jurisdictions, the report said.

According to the FT‘s report, the number of wealth managers offering UK investors offshore services “dropped by a fifth in 2016 compared to the previous year”, data compiled for it by Wealth-X, an international research organisation with offices in London, New York and Hong Kong, said.

“However, two-thirds of wealth managers surveyed said they still offered some offshore services,” the FT report noted.

It said the drop in the use of offshore financial jurisdictions was at least partly due to a tightening up of the rules surrounding the exchange of information between tax jurisdictions.

To read the FT’s story on the publication’s website, which has a paywall, click here.